Joanna Blythman - The Food Our Children Eat - How to Get Children to Like Good Food

How to Get Children to Like Good Food

Cover

Title Page THE FOOD OUR CHILDREN EAT How to Get Children to Like Good Food

A few pages to read first

PART ONE: THE GHETTO OF ‘CHILDREN’S FOOD’

The modern ‘children’s diet’

‘Picky-eater’ culture

Parents’ attitudes

The rot begins with those little jars

Staggered eating

Sweets as food

Crisp crazy

The flickering screen

Gift-wrapped junk

Goodbye dinner lady, hello cash cafeteria

Child (un)friendly restaurants

PART TWO: BREAKING THE MOULD AT HOME

The real-food approach

Getting the message across

Spending priorities

The ‘tunnel effect’ and how to prevent it

Eating together and why it matters

The ‘never-satisfied’ snacker

Don’t keep food you don’t want children to eat

Presentation, boredom and the ‘yuck’ reaction

Sweets, treats and bans

Good food that children like

What children should drink

Healthier look-alike alternatives to common ‘children’s foods’

PART THREE: THE GENTLE ART OF PERSUASION

Dealing with children who say no

Avoiding the same old mistakes

Setting up a cooperative food relationship

Refining objections to food

Serving up praise by the bucketload

Making mealtimes work

The scope for insistence

Giving in gracefully but …

PART FOUR: GETTING IT RIGHT WITH BABIES AND TODDLERS

You know best

The essential blender

Introducing the world of food

Pesticide residue risks and the organic alternative

PART FIVE: INFLUENCING WHAT CHILDREN EAT WHEN YOU’RE NOT THERE

What you can expect from childcarers

Negotiating with nurseries and playgroups

The friend’s house

School food

PART SIX: TESTING SITUATIONS

Shopping tips

Car trips

Birthday parties

Grandparents’ houses

PART SEVEN: CONSOLIDATING YOUR EFFORTS

Encouraging children to cook

The fun and skill of food shopping

The fascinating world of restaurant food

Exercising junior tastebuds

PART EIGHT: NITTY-GRITTY IDEAS AND RECIPES FOR INSPIRATION

Twenty-five good snacks

Ten main courses that both adults and children like

Ten good drinks

Ten good packed lunches

Ten ways to get children to eat vegetables

Ten ideas for making eating more fun

Ten easy recipes that children can make

Appendix: Checklist of Additives to Avoid

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

This is a book for people who want their children to become adults with wide-ranging food tastes, adults who select a good diet for themselves and find pleasure in the process of eating.

Achieving such an outcome ought to be a straightforward matter, but these days children who fit this bill are something of an endangered species. Children no longer eat what adults eat. We now live in a world that assumes children must be catered for separately, from a repertoire of special ‘children’s foods’ designed to please their distinctive palate.

In the new millennium, perhaps sociologists and social historians will look back on the second half of the twentieth century and point to the emergence of this separate diet as a curious phenomenon. When you stop to think about it, it’s a huge watershed. For centuries children all over the world have been brought up to eat what their parents ate.

Traditionally, children’s food has always been inextricably linked with adult diet, right from day one. Children were breastfed – even if that meant finding a wet nurse.

Graduating on to more complex foods, they were fed ground-down, pulverised versions of what the extended family was eating. As soon as they had teeth and had become more independent, they ate whatever was produced in the kitchen in whatever form it emerged.

Now in many industrialised countries, and in the UK in particular, it’s more likely that children are tucking into a restricted number of specifically ‘children’s foods’. We are all too familiar with them. The working title ‘junk’ fits them as well as any other. But if we wanted to analyse that loaded term a little further, we might describe it as consisting of a small selection of highly processed, long-life foods – many technological interventions removed from their raw-food roots – heavily loaded with fat, sugar and salt.

Enter the ‘modern’ child and a typical food day. This might start with a bowl of highly refined cereal stuck together with sugar in one form or another, followed by a sweet drink and a packet of crisps for morning snack. Chips and custard might be the most popular canteen choice at lunchtime, or a protein and fat-based, vegetable-free sandwich in the lunch box, accompanied by sweets, a token apple (if you’re lucky) and often yet another packet of crisps. In the starving after-school interval, biscuits and more crisps fill the gap until an early ‘children’s teatime’, when out come the frozen Kievs, fish fingers, pizzas and burgers, destined to be scoffed with chips and copious amounts of ketchup and washed down by something sweet and fizzy. For pudding, there’s the sickly-sweet ‘kiddie’ yogurt with its lovable cartoon characters and child-friendly synthetic flavours. Not surprisingly, by bedtime they’re hungry again and it’s time for supper. That packet of cereal beckons once more, as do the biscuits.

The consequences of this change in our attitude towards child nutrition are so enormous that they are hard to grasp. We are embarked on an experiment with our children’s health that is unprecedented. This is a radical departure from the tried and tested way of nourishing children that societies have adopted since history began.

You don’t have to be a paediatrician to figure out that this sort of eating defies the laws of nutrition. Nearly every item has been processed out of its natural form. It is top-heavy on ingredients we know cause health problems long-term and notoriously short on those that keep the human body healthy: whole, unprocessed plant foods, especially fruit and vegetables. So we are living through a strange irony. Instead of being given the best food available, as they ought to be, children are being given the worst.

It is going to take time for the impact of this major change in eating patterns to show through but initial indications are not good. Worrying tales have emerged from the US, where doctors have been shocked by the premature furring up of arteries that has inadvertently come to light when children have been admitted to hospital as road casualties.

Teachers complain that their pupils’ concentration span is not what it should be because they are going from one quick sugary snack to another and simply don’t have the stamina that a long, slow release of nutrients from a balanced diet would give them. According to the World Health Organisation, ‘The prevalence of overweight and obesity is increasing worldwide at an alarming rate … Moreover, as the problem appears to be increasing rapidly in children as well as adults, the truth health consequences may only become fully apparent in the distant future.’